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Eggs and Endorphins

Balticon, Collesium, dw codes

5/26/09 01:21 pm - Balticon, Collesium, dw codes

If you still need a DW invite (and know me), talk to me. I've got quite a few.

Balticon was fun, if odd. Friday night, I came in, saw people, ate dinner with peoples, changed, danced like a madman, went back to the room, and crashed. Saturday, I caught half of quadrivium's concert, did Patches' excellent Renn dance (where I ended up being her demo partner = fun), gamed most of the day (once I was awake), got a nice dinner with selki, drcpunk, and Pamela, gamed a bit more, stopped by some parties on the way to the filk room...and found that the filk had ended sometime before 2:30AM. So it goes. So I played a bit of Werewolf (annoyingly, a game soured because a player didn't realize they weren't a werewolf, the mod announced a werewolf innocent to the seer, and the mod didn't have the brains to -correct his mistake- before endgame was hit. So the seer looked at all three werewolves and lived to talk about it, yet the town "lost") and went to bed. Sunday, I gamed all day, had dinner with drcpunk, nancylebov, esrblog, and cathyr19355, and went directly to the filking -- so actually got a few good hours of filking in (even if I did torture Gwen's Like Their Feet Have Wings mercilessly; I'm not usually -that- bad on the words or even the chords; I think I brain was cramped [and I do try to sing songs with the words even when I know them, but my laptop was in for repair this weekend and I neglected to arrange a replacement for the con]). After filking broke up WAY TOO EARLY, I went over to the gaming room and got a few hours of Dominion and Race for the Galaxy in before bed.

Monday, I hung out in the gaming room for a bunch of hours. Where I was introduced to Colosseum. Which kicks ass.

Colosseum is a Wolfgang Kramer game -- and it shows. But while there are clear connections to Princes of Florence (eg, it's a art-themed financial game with the same style of auction, and a separate-but-related score track), I like it a lot better. For starters, it's a well-designed game with many of my favorite game elements -- development, trading, money management, auctions, as well as some other interesting ones (screw-the-leader, -aid- the leader (yes, both -- the leader gets a +3 on all further scores and has one of her pieces stolen from her in each of the four preparatory rounds), collections, and game win by best-score (which is why I refer to it as 4 preparatory rounds and one final round--as, unless you're playing badly, your score in the final round will dwarf your previous scores. For example, my round 4 score was 40 and my round 5 score was 85, and I won by 3 points).

I like it a lot, and have gone ahead and bought myself a copy (along with Le Havre, which is a bit long, but as the sequel to Agricola, I must own if nobody else in my friendship circle has it, and nobody does).

I feel slightly responsible for that soured game, as I made the error of trusting that the mod had done something wacky (like deciding to add an extra werewolf because the village had been doing so well all weekend) and was on top of things [since, well, they didn't say anything], and by the time it was clear the something wacky was a screwup the game was well underway (and we were having a good game over in our corner while the mod was screwing things up over on the other side of the circle anyway). Meh. I'm sorry you didn't join us for any other games, as we had a generally pretty good weekend of playing, definitely improving as time went on.

The tension of your uncertain trust of me and trying to keep that where it needed to be was really interesting, as was the state of knowing I was running out of time to eat you before you either caught me or (as you did) effectively led the village to victory by being good at the game, but knowing that you were a simple villager and I really needed to find the damn seer.

I think I've learned this weekend that, at Balticon, as a werewolf, all my energies need to go into identifying the seer ASAP, because I will be checked in the first two nights, and they can't be allowed to live to identify me to the village.

Oddly, thinking back on the last couple of years, it feels like almost all the games we've actually been in together I've been a werewolf and you've been pro-village.

This is an interesting metagame fact, but yeah. OTOH, werewolves are strongest when they're trying to identify the seer -- since while it's not identical (and, in fact, some wolfy tells are related to seer hunting) looking for the seer can look an awful lot like looking for wolves.

I think two-years-at-origins, we played at least one game as fellow wolves and that perfect game with Cat as a wolf and both of us as town. But yeah, you're really commonly a wolf when I'm town.

So why'd you think I was a townie? Because I was too trusting of you, in a way that would be really unlikely if I were the seer and had checked you? (eg, breadcrumbing the wrong bloody message)?

After a bunch of plays we've actually gotten Le Havre down to an hour and a half or so (not dissimilar to our average playtime for Agricola). It's a lot random and has a lot less first-to-expand-wins, so it got a lot of play around here (of course, now that its summer, many of the board gamers are gone).